Women entrepreneurs are making great strides in a very competitive business world by bringing innovation and creativity to the forefront. Although there are many difficulties and opportunities surrounding women in business, one of the most important areas that needs focus is cash flow management. For the purpose of this blog, I’d like to discuss special issues and tools of empowerment for women in small businesses.
Nurturing personal relationships, leveraging professional connections, and embracing online communities can provide you with the invaluable support and guidance you need to navigate the challenges and thrive in the competitive world of entrepreneurship.
Alberta's technology industry is on the rise, with Calgary and Edmonton emerging as key tech hubs in the province. As an entrepreneur, you can tap into a large and diverse talent pool, benefit from a supportive startup ecosystem, and enjoy government support for innovation. However, like any growing tech scene, there are also challenges to be aware of, including competition for talent and access to capital. In this blog, we explore the opportunities and challenges facing entrepreneurs in Alberta's tech scene, and how you can navigate them to build a successful business. Click to read more and discover the potential of Alberta's tech sector for entrepreneurs.
As a business owner many people will look to you as a leader during difficult situations. Customers and staff alike will look for direction on how your business is going to operate going forward and how they will fit into that picture. There are a few key things to keep in mind when creating a communication strategy that will help keep the conversations going in the right direction.
Nasim Morawej first heard about Alberta Women Entrepreneurs after starting her engineering firm, Sentient Tools, in 2017. When positions opened up on the Board of Directors at Alberta Women Entrepreneurs shortly after, she decided it would be a good opportunity. That choice allowed her to navigate entrepreneurship while helping shape the future of it for women in Alberta.
The COVID pandemic has reshaped nearly every aspect of our everyday lives. For business owners, the stress of a new normal has been compounded. The more intimate setting of a small business means that the impacts of hardship are apparent and often more personal.
“The pandemic has impacted small business tremendously,” says Jenifer Horvath, a Business Advisor with Alberta Women Entrepreneurs (AWE).
Over the past 22 months Alberta Women Entrepreneurs has been hard at work facilitating the creation of an impact paper that will revolutionize the way that women entrepreneurs are supported in Alberta.
Using a collective impact model, 68 organizations from across six regional areas of the province – Edmonton, Calgary, Grande Prairie, St. Paul, Medicine Hat, and Lethbridge – have come together to address some of the biggest challenges facing women entrepreneurs. This new strategic approach will create a more sustainable path forward to overcome these barriers.
Kathryn Joel has been running her business, Get Cooking, for the past 10 years, but like so many other businesses, when COVID hit she had to consider how to move to an online format. Since her website was designed with an in-person event model in mind, there were a lot of hurdles for her small team to figure out.
When it comes to improving your business’s online presence, creating engaging digital content is a requirement for growth hacking and overall long-term success! The creation of online content opens the door for a broader reach to new and upcoming potential clients and audiences all while increasing your brand awareness with warmer leads
Today is a day of celebration, pride, gratitude, and optimism; today is International Women’s Entrepreneurship Day!
As an organization, our goal is to achieve parity for women entrepreneurs in Alberta and beyond. For more than twenty-five years, we have connected women with access to capital, training and workshops, business advising, and mentorship opportunities—supporting the entrepreneurial dreams of women in our communities.
Recently, AWE sat down with Adetoun (Abby) Aiyeleye, a longtime innovator, entrepreneur and Co-founder of Clavis Studio, an online design platform that simplifies the home design experience for professionals and design enthusiasts using immersive 3D technology. Through their interactive, immersive experience, the company is expanding market access for small businesses and creating opportunities for people who want simple, integrated and highly-effective tools to get their work done.
Social media is critical for businesses in 2021 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, if you’re not a fan of social media in your personal life this can be a challenge. We get it! Social media is not without its criticism, unnecessary comparisons and misinformation are just some of the reasons why some people might not engage with it.
From a business perspective, however, social media is filled with opportunity. Unlike any other marketing approach, social platforms can allow ideal customers from all over the world to find your business instantly. In this way, you can connect with others that believe in your vision and can help you succeed. Even more so, social media allows you to directly communicate with your customers, whether it be for promotional purposes or operational.
Without a doubt, you can leverage social media for your business to improve brand awareness, build community, communicate with your customers, and stand out from your competition.
Social media platforms are the perfect place for your business to develop brand awareness. From showcasing eye-catching brand materials on your profiles, to telling your brand story to capture the hearts and minds of your consumers, social media allows you to stay top-of-mind so that when it comes to making a purchase decision, your business is front and centre.
Through sophisticated algorithms, social media applications are excellent at recommending profiles to the right audience, thus increasing the visibility of your business to those most likely to resonate with, and be interested in, your offering.
In particular, Taboola identifies four key advantages of brand awareness you can gain through social media:
Increase market share and sales
Scale in new places
Improve brand perception
Acquire audience data
Ideally, your customers are not only one piece in a transactional puzzle. The goal is to foster relationships with reciprocal value. The more value that you can provide to them through interesting, exciting, or informative content, the more you will be rewarded with trust, loyalty, engagement, and affinity towards your brand and the products you offer.
This concept comes from what is known as inbound marketing, in which your business can use tools to attract, engage, and delight your customers to lead to conversion and retention, and eventually, the growth of your business.
The purpose of social media marketing is not to gain followers to speak at, it is to build a community that you can engage with, a practice that is much more sustainable and will result in a much higher ROI in the long run.
Think about the brands that you love—what do they have in common? We can guarantee that it’s because they’ve invested in an engaged community, and social media is an excellent way to do just that.
Check out this website for tips to build a social media community.
Don’t you wish there was a way to reach your customers directly, in a place you know they’d always be, where you could speak directly to them? Social media is exactly that!
Through social media channels, you can speak directly to your customers, to communicate product launches, promotions, your company values, and important information like location and hours of operation.
Not only so—social media communication is a two-way street! Social media presents an excellent opportunity to excel at customer service interactions: you can answer questions, respond to feedback, and generally build goodwill through positive, personalized interactions with your customers.
Finally, social media profiles are an opportunity to stand out. Similar to a physical storefront, social media profiles present your business to the public, urging customers to choose your business over its competitors. On social media, you can highlight what sets your business apart, including differentiating factors, stellar branding, customer reviews, and more.
And, if you’re still not convinced, social media may be necessary simply for your business to remain competitive, given its ubiquity in marketing strategies everywhere.
While social media is incredibly important, there are some stipulations that you’ll want to keep in mind if you wish to succeed.
First, you want to ensure that you are on the right platforms, not every platform. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, the list goes on, consider your target market and which social media applications they congregate on, in addition to the nature of each platform and where your content will best fit.
Second, quality is important. Aim for consistent, high quality content that aligns with your brand and represents it well. Quantity is irrelevant if your posts are substandard or lack intention.
Lastly, follow the 80/20 Rule. If you want your audience to engage with your content and share it with others such that your profiles can grow, 80% of your content must be interesting, informative, exciting, humorous, entertaining or simply offer something valuable to your audience. The remaining 20% can be promotional or sales-oriented, but once you start to exceed that, you’ll likely see performance drop.
With a dedicated social media strategy, you can stick to best practices like the above, with measurable results to achieve business goals. It might not be easy at first, but we can guarantee that it’s worth it.
